Detail

Briefly describe the work you do.

Digging, thinking, wasting, writing, looking, smoking, twinkling, mixing, sewing, collecting, breathing, holding, drinking, deciding, running, discarding, rejecting, accepting, deciding, decinding, deciding, painting.

Tell us a little about your background and how that influences you as an artist.

The answer lies – as with many artists – in my early childhood. I still feel strongly connected to my experiences and emotions during my early childhood. I still can recover from my “storage” those feelings even from my age of four. When you are a child your world is small. But deep. Like a deep sea. And so are your emotions and experiences. The older you get, the wider gets the lake. It develops into a pond, it gets more flat. The deep sea. There’s a gap between this unconscious deep sea of childhood and the flat pond of manhood.

And I’m still swimming in between those gaps. So there are autobiographical elements in my work , it’s hard to avoid them, but they are not primary. What I’m doing is digging in the common marketplace, searching for those moments which connect to my inner experiences and emotions. In this sense I stay on a personal level.

Nonetheless I work with imagery which isn’t personal. Just the selection is personal. Inspiration can come from anywhere. What interest me are the truths which lay underneath the surface of the pictures, truths which show oneself just every once in a while, like an aurora borealis on a winter sky.

Searching For The Place

The concept of the “artist studio” has a broad range of meanings, especially in contemporary practice. The idea of the artist toiling away alone in a room may not necessarily reflect what many artists do from day to day anymore. Describe your studio practice and how it differs from (or is the same as) traditional notions of “being in the studio.”

To me the studio is my workplace, my frame of  production, my private ivory tower. But the ideas themselves develop for the most part somewhere else. The usual remedy of everyday life keeps me going, is my motor – boundaries between painting and every day life are crossed. I try to stay dedicated, patient, perseverant – if I don’t have a bad hair day. But also trouble and mistakes are welcome – loosing control  offers a lot of benefits.

What unique roles do you see yourself as the artist playing that you may not have envisioned yourself in when you first started making art?

In a word: solitude.

When do you find is the best time of day to make art? Do you have time set aside every day, every week or do you just work whenever you can? 

I go along with Chuck Close fort this answer:

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”

Egg

How has your work changed in the last five years? How is it the same?

The timeframe is pretty much the same – I work in the morning and in the evening, the afternoon is reserved for private stuff and family. I’m always interested in using new materials, new pigments, new tools. It’s like cooking.

Right now I have set my focus to work on whole installations, working on an exhibition as a whole setting, stepping aside from „just painting “.  This way to work offers  other mediums, media, sizes, etc. For example for my last exhibition „All Life Still“ I created a sound installation and was working with light.

Are there people such as family, friends, writers, philosophers or even pop icons that have had an impact on the work you do?

Self aware people are always inspiring, people who are self-confidently committed to their work and honest about what they are doing.  To me those people are „artist“. Who are connected to their inner guidance.  This kind of attitude makes an great impact.  They make a change, they open new windows and broaden our views – regardless their profession.

If you had an occupation outside of being an artist, what would that be and why?

I would be a writer, an author writing travel guides, I just love traveling. If I’m stuck in a rut, a trip is the best thing for me to do. The  benefits aren new perspectives, ideas and thoughts.

Engram III

anne-herzbluth.de

All images copyright of the artist and used with their permission.